“You mean when you saw that big, juicy bunny and didn’t realize it was the sheriff and then his wolf Omega kicked your ass?” Rafe tried to hold back a laugh and failed, choking on his beer instead. “Yeah, vaguely.”
“Fuck you.” I rolled my eyes. “I’d caught his scent in the woods around the townhomes where that happened. That’s why I was there in the first place.”
“And that’s the job Ralph pulled you off of to help when Colby went missing.” It was a statement, not a question, but I nodded anyway.
Of course, I’d dropped everything when the Blood Valley Omega had gone missing. Rafe would have done the same for me.
Hell, so would Colby.
“Anyway, at this point, he’s got to be huge and scared.” I sighed and frowned, pushing my beer away. “And I’m running out of time to find him.”
Chapter Two
Jeremy
“Yeah, yeah, baby. I know.” I groaned as what I knew had to be a tiny foot – or paw, possibly – landed square on my bladder. Rolling over onto my side, I sighed as the pressure abated, but I knew the relief was only temporary. I was going to have to get up and go out in the cold to pee.
Again.
Grumbling to myself, I struggled to sit up, reaching for the holey tennis shoes I’d lined with rabbit skins and stuffed my swollen feet inside, sighing as the soft fur caressed my rough skin. Pushing myself to my feet, I took a couple of staggering steps, wincing as the now-familiar pain shot through my ass and down the back of my thigh.
Sciatica, one of the women at the library had suggested helpfully when I’d initially freaked out over the pain. A little bit of research had confirmed that she was probably right. It wasn’t much fun, but it also wasn’t dangerous – to me or the baby.
Or babies, plural.
Who knew.
Twins were pretty common in my clan, but without any medical care during the pregnancy, I honestly had no idea.
Hell, I wasn’t even sure how far along I was.
And, since I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do when I went into labor, I’d just kept burying my head in the sand and pretending the problem didn’t exist.
Mature, huh?
And that was pretty much how I found myself getting ready to sneak into the woods to pee, a rusty metal coffee can full of kitchen scraps stolen from the trash of my upstairs neighbor clutched in my chapped fingers.
Even though my bladder was screaming at me, I listened carefully before lifting the hidden trapdoor that led to my hidden den underneath the hunting lodge. I’d made the mistake of rushing out blind from my hiding place in an abandoned garage several weeks back and had nearly walked right into the jaws of a hyena on the prowl. And let’s be honest, there was a limited number of reasons that a hyena would be sniffing around the tiny mountain town of Sharon Hill.
He was obviously looking for me, but, luckily, he’d been distracted by a large white rabbit and missed me ducking back into my hiding place.
It seemed my sisters hadn’t given up on finding their golden goose yet, after all.
So much for wishful thinking.
After that, I’d made it a point to mark a path all over the place.
At first, I’d hopped the local tourist trolley on one of the weekly hop-on, hop-off tours and, at each stop, I’d found an obvious spot and dribbled urine from the lemonade bottle in my hand, leaving a well-marked scent trail all over the town.
Then, once I was convinced that I’d covered nearly every block of the town proper, I’d shifted and spent weeks loping through the nights, covering dozens of miles up and down mountainsides as I left scent markers that doubled back over each other. Then, when I thought I’d covered as much of the countryside as I could, I’d hopped a train to the towns on either side of Sharon Hill and spent weeks repeating the same maneuver, hoping that those fresher trails would protect me from prying noses that might track my older, fainter scent to the area closer to my hideout.
It was exhausting.
Now that I was too big to shift comfortably and moving took more effort, I’d resorted to using a makeshift latrine hidden in the woods where I could toss garbage down the hole, using the smell of rotting food scraps to cover the smells that could lead my stalkers to me.
But, again, I had to get to it without being seen and that brought my loopy pregnancy brain back to why I was listening at the underside of the well-concealed closed trap door, waiting for the slightest scrape of wood or thud of a rubber sole that might indicate an intruder trying to sniff me out.
Once I was confident that there wasn’t anyone in the tiny lean-to that the trapdoor was in, I made my way out through the trees, shivering every step as the icy wind cut through the thin fabric of my windbreaker.
